For all it means embarking on the social experience of post-secondary education. Luckily for post-secondary students, innovators in the Ryerson Digital Media Zone have been busy all summer developing digitally based products and services to help students cope with going back to school.

Currently available in the iPhone App Store, Burstn is a real-time image sharing platform that makes it fun and easy to share photos, including the GPS location information of where they were shot. Friends and family see their loved one’s photos instantly, the moment they’re snapped.

The cool thing about Burstn for post-secondary students is that they can literally create a visual timeline of their college or university experience

“Your friends and family can follow you and receive live updates to their phones, or they can visit your own Burstn URL and view your photo stream with all your photos from oldest to newest, effectively archiving your life,”said Josh Davey, co-creator of the newly launched Burstn.

Up-to-the-minute photos shared automatically on Facebook and Twitter let pictures do the talking with visual status updates. Burstn also offers such social networking tools as “liking” photos, tagging friends and adding captions. As adoption grows, students will also be able to discover and follow events on their campuses and in their cities.

“So often you miss out on seeing your friends’ photos because they sit on someone’s camera forever until they drudge up the motivation to upload them somewhere,” said Dave Senior, Burstn’s other co-creator. “With Burstn you just shoot the pictures and it does all the rest. Photos were meant to be shared – especially with those far away. This application definitely makes it easier to go away to school if you can see what your friends back home are up to and vice versa.”